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t4toilet

The toadstool is tiny because J doesn’t know the dose yet, and anyway I have work in the morning. I chew and swallow, the bitterness lodging in my teeth. It’s snowing, and J and I have plans to go for a nice long walk.

We’re just about to start bundling up when I remember. It’s like being in a car crash: knowing many things at once; the desperate wish to undo; the gaming out of one to three horrifying futures. How could I have forgotten? Within the next few days—maybe even tomorrow—my employer is having my piss analyzed for drug use, and psilocybin is one of the substances the panel will be screening for.

Lose my job. This is more of a sensation than an arrangement of words. I’m going to have to tell Jade that I lost my job because I’m stupid. This is a coherent sentence.

J feels responsible, though of course he shouldn’t. I knew these tests were coming, my first from an employer in over a decade, and yet I ate the mushroom. Still—and I’ve talked about this with him, and with Jade, and in therapy—there is something about J that changes the way I make choices. If only I had waited until after the test to spend time with him, one of the few trans men with whom I feel close. When I came out as trans in my early twenties, I began making friends with other transmasculine people, gay boys like me. When I recloseted not long after, I lost almost all of them except for one very patient and surprisingly self-actualized transfag. My internalized transphobia lived under glass, for all to see; I was not safe for transmasculine people. Even now that I’ve begun the process of fixing my heart, I still get along better with the dolls than with I do with the boys.

I begin to pace J’s living room. How did this happen? Poor timing. Self-sabotage. Pure bad luck. Without laying any blame at J’s feet, I think it’s safe to say that this could only have happened with him. But there’s this too: only J, a sadist, can help me now.

Everyone who meets J likes him instantly. He’s always smiling. You have to make yourself throw up, he advises, smiling. When he says it, I feel less afraid. It seems so simple, and really, it is. They should hire him to deliver cancer diagnoses.

The problem is, I can’t throw up by myself. I broke that mechanism a long time ago. I need help, I tell J. Will you help me? I know he will.

J’s left hand fits down my throat like a glove. His right rests on my shoulder. He presses down with both. You could say he fucks my face. Nothing doing.

Harder, I tell him when I come up for air. Nothing comes out except for some saliva. He teases me for not having a gag reflex.

All that cocksucking, he says.

My laughter squeezes his fingers. I feel grateful that he enjoys my fear and discomfort.

But the gratitude doesn’t cancel out the panic. My stomach is empty and my veins dehydrated, which means there’s almost nothing inside me, other than the mushroom, to be purged. What can I do? It won’t be long before I start metabolizing it.

What grosses you out? J prompts.

The hallmark of a sadist is an instinct to problem-solve. They approach your world of pain and fear like a puzzle, shrinking it down to a more tolerable size. I’m glad J is thinking, because I can’t. What grosses me out? Mold, maybe?

What if I throw up? he asks. Would that work?

This makes me laugh. I’ve been wiping asses and changing menstrual pads my whole life. I’ve spoonfed hundreds of mouths. I’ve listened to pedophiles, sick with post-coital sincerity, admit their crimes. My dad taught me how to eat insects. Your dad paid hundreds of dollars to eat my shit.

Nothing a body can do grosses me out, I tell J.

I’ve been saying this forever, to reassure friends fearful that I might judge them for being human. Now it’s the least reassuring thing I can think of.

J goes to his kitchen and starts opening cabinets. He’s going to make a concoction to disgust me, like the kind you make with your cousins, daring each other to drink the ketchup mixed with orange juice mixed with toothpaste. I chug tap water as he pours unseen liquids and powders into a glass. He stirs it with a spoon, takes a big whiff.

Oh god, he says.

He hands me eight ounces of what looks like rancid salad dressing.

Honestly, it doesn’t smell that bad to me, I say.

He adds a raw egg. For texture, he says, smiling.

Back to the bathroom. I down the drink. Salty, peppery, spicy, mucosal. It’s certainly gross, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it noxious. He tries to purge me again. My throat’s beginning to hurt. My neck will be sore tomorrow, I know. Nothing happens. Nothing comes up.

What about saltwater? J asks.

My mom used to purge that way, I say, remembering.

He mixes me another drink: a finger of kosher salt and more water from the tap.

That’s a lot. J sounds uncertain but he’s still smiling. He and I, similarly complected, are flushed. My face feels bloated. My nose is running.

Not more than a bottle of Gatorade, I say. I don’t think I’m right, but I want to be. At least my stomach is starting to hurt. We go back to bathroom and now I put my own hand down my throat. Still nothing. My desperation is a hum, like fluorescent lights. This is so cool, J keeps saying.

He’s googling on his phone. Ipecac? he asks. I tell him about my history with that stuff. If you don’t know how it works, I promise you, you don’t want to.

I’d rather get fired, I tell him. I really would. 

I think I’m the one who suggests gut-punching. I’ve never done it before. Neither has J. Our first time. We stand together by the toilet. I put up my hands up in something like a Don’t shoot gesture and wait, trying not to flinch. J is strong and likes to hit, as I’ve learned from a few scenes together. He’s made me cry before. But right now I’m too tense. It does hurt, but less than you’d imagine, and nothing about it is nauseating. I think about my mom again. One time she and I were playing foosball at her boyfriend’s house. I was losing, and I slammed one of the bars in frustration, hitting her right in the belly. She didn’t say a word, just went and stood outside for a long time.

You’re too ready, J says. I cover my eyes so he can surprise me. The punches hurt more now, but they’re not getting me there. I think we’re having too much fun. 

You don’t do anything, J remarks. If I was you, I wouldn’t be able to not swing back. 

That’s the difference between you and me, I say. And thank god for that.

Now that gut-punching has failed, I think about the pro-ana/pro-mia forums I used to hang out on when I was a kid. What about a toothbrush? I wonder. It’s so basic. J pulls one out of a fixture in the bathroom wall. The bottom has been whittled to a sharp point.

Why? I ask.

So it’ll fit, he says, pointing to the tiny hole in the fixture. He’s such a boy.

I go back to the toilet and he stands behind me, right behind me, to watch. That’s nice. I feel like I can show him anything. I could drop my pants and take a shit right now and he wouldn’t care. Maybe it’s everything else, maybe it’s the way emergencies relax me, but with the toothbrush (the business end, not the sharp one), I finally start to feel sick. I puke five or six times, spicy water burning my nose. Reverse Bloody Mary. Euphoria.

I stop to take a breath. Doesn’t this gross you out? I ask him.

Nope, J says. He examines the toilet bowl carefully, like he’s reading sheet music. We’ve talked about limits before, and ours are about the same: no shit. Everything else is on the table. Increasingly so, it would seem.

That’s it! I yell. Nutty brown specks in the clear yellow. I puke a few more times, just to make sure. The brown specks look like money to me.

You don’t have to, says J, but I insist. He finds some Clorox wipes and I carefully clean the toilet, inside and out. I drop the wipes in the water. You can’t flush those, he says. He fishes them out with his hand.

Now I just wait, I say. If I don’t come up, we’ll know we got it all.

The scene is over. We clean ourselves up. We put on our hats and coats. I feel silly and spacey and good, and hope it’s just endorphins, the purger’s cozy high. J keeps checking my eyes. I think ours are the same color. His are already dilating, but he says mine are still normal.

The snow falls like a Christmas movie. Winter comes to New York City, said the news this morning. It’s the last day of February. I fear the future every moment, but right now it doesn’t matter. As we make our way to the Manhattan Bridge, J points at slick garbage bags and raging steam vents and red light bulbs hanging from abandoned buildings. His smile shines. I can’t see their beauty in the way he can, so I know I’m safe.

The next day, he texts to check in on me. My toilet has never been so clean, he says.

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